Politicshttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/83
Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:23:10 GMT2017-12-14T00:23:10ZContemporary Rangatiratanga: Do Treaty settlements enable rangatira to exercise rangatiratanga?http://hdl.handle.net/10523/7781
Contemporary Rangatiratanga: Do Treaty settlements enable rangatira to exercise rangatiratanga?
2017
Russell, Darryn John
This thesis asks whether Treaty of Waitangi settlements enable or re-establish Māori rangatiratanga guaranteed by Te Tiriti o Waitangi, in a contemporary context. It does so by first establishing the pūtake (foundations) of the traditional exercise of rangatiratanga; namely, whakapapa (genealogical descent), mana (prestige, authority, power, sovereignty), hapū (societal community), and whenua (geographical place). In addition, pūtake extended to incorporate kawa and tikanga (cultural lore) and utu (reciprocity). These pūtake were societal pillars for the framework of rangatiratanga.
This form of authority was recognised in the Declaration of Independence in 1835. In 1840 the British also recognised the authority of rangatira in the Treaty of Waitangi, and guaranteed to protect rangatiratanga. The Crown failed in many ways to uphold this guarantee after 1840; many policies, laws and actions undermined Maori rangatiratanga. Maori responded to this marginalisation of their authority in a variety of ways, but it was not until the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 that the Crown began to recognise and redress its many Treaty breaches. Through this process the Crown has reached settlements with Maori. Two qualitative cases are discussed based on interviews with contemporary leaders from the two iwi, Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Whātua. These cases are not a comparison, rather my primary interest is in the Ngāi Tahu case, with Ngāti Whātua providing an alternative experience from an iwi not yet through the settlement process.
Ultimately, this thesis concludes that the settlement process does not provide rangatiratanga to rangatira and hapū. The process of settlement is set and determined by the Crown and the requirement for hapū to rearrange into natural larger groupings, dismantles any self-determining framework of the original claimant group. Therefore, the leadership requirement in this post-settlement, namely governance, is not the same thing as rangatiratanga for whānau and hapū.
For Ngāi Tahu this means rangatiratanga must be future driven by internal dreams for self-determination.
Thu, 07 Dec 2017 23:14:51 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/77812017-12-07T23:14:51ZDemocratisation Progress in Turkey Under the Justice and Development Party 2002 to 2014http://hdl.handle.net/10523/7694
Democratisation Progress in Turkey Under the Justice and Development Party 2002 to 2014
2017
Baycar Aydogan, Nilay
This thesis examines the democratisation progress of Turkey during the period 2002 to 2014, a period in which the Justice and Development Party (the ‘JDP’) held continuous national office, in order to answer its central research question: How and to what extent has the JDP contributed to democratisation in Turkey? The JDP case illustrates the complexity of applying the democratisation concept in real human affairs. Since its foundation in 1923, the Republic of Turkey has seen democratisation as a necessary adjunct of a modernisation that the founders of the republic considered vital to maintain the Turkish nation and the republic’s territorial integrity after the Ottoman collapse. The new republic by its nature is secular albeit a superstructure to an Islamic foundation centuries old that remains vibrant. Since its inception, Turkey’s democratic journey has suffered set-backs due to tensions between the secular state and domestic political Islam. The Turkish state through its constitutional framework and its historic military tutelage has attempted to hold down political Islam. Around 2000, the Turkish state and domestic political Islam were in stalemate; the latter was contained but persistent. The JDP emerged out of political parties some of which had previously been Islamic in nature. The new party’s leaders publicly rejected its political roots and pledged to enhance Turkey’s democratic journey as a new way of resolving those tensions. What I have been looking for in my research are quantum advances in Turkey’s democratisation momentum under the JDP, advances not only insulating Turkey from recidivism but confirming the JDP’s democratisation credentials. I have used ‘liberal democracy’ as my yardstick to identify and assess these advances. Domestic events in Turkey in 2013 and 2014 sorely tested the latter. During my research, I have used the qualitative research method and operated on the societal/national level of analysis. I worked with academic books and articles, and researched primary documents. I also interviewed political actors, academics and journalists. My findings were mixed in terms of the JDP’s enhancements to Turkey’s democratisation, reflecting a challenging environment for the JDP after 2012, when electoral hubris and domestic events stymied the party’s democratisation momentum. However, I argue that key building blocks to secure a sustainable democratisation process were put in place by the JDP in its early years in office. Further, the party has flourished electorally since 2002, a testament to its skill at managing tensions. I have concluded that the JDP, notwithstanding challenges to its democratic credentials, has made significant contributions to democratic progress in Turkey by locking in fundamental reforms that will embed democratisation in Turkey.
Mon, 06 Nov 2017 01:58:51 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/76942017-11-06T01:58:51ZEthical Norm Promotion in European Union Foreign Policy: Responding to the Arab Uprisings in the Southern Neighbourhoodhttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/7615
Ethical Norm Promotion in European Union Foreign Policy: Responding to the Arab Uprisings in the Southern Neighbourhood
2017
Meikle, Chris
The European Union (EU) has increasingly used its external policy mechanisms to export the principles that it was founded upon: democracy, rule of law, social justice and, in particular, respect for human rights. This approach has long been evident in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which includes the Union for the Mediterranean states to the south. However, a number of these southern states have been thrown into disarray by the popular revolutions which swept through the Arab world in 2011; although these uprisings seem to share many of the principles which the EU has sought to promote, the implications for the EU’s role in the region are still far from clear.
In order to assess the extent to which the EU has demonstrated an ethically normative foreign policy in response to the Arab Uprisings, this research sets out to establish which of the international norms that the EU promotes in the North Africa and Middle East (MENA) region can be considered ethical, and whether or not they can be differentiated from the EU’s “interests”. The discussion of ethics, norms and interests in EU external action is situated within the Normative Power Europe literature, which also provides the theoretical framework for the analysis that takes place in later chapters. It is shown that the EU correlates its promotion of some norms with international human rights discourse, and rhetorically advances itself as an ethically normative actor by highlighting the centrality of such norms to its international identity.
The EU’s policy towards the MENA region is assessed before, during and after the Arab Uprisings, both at a regional and a bilateral level, the latter with regard to the particular cases of Tunisia and Morocco. The research draws on an analysis of official EU documents, secondary academic sources and interviews conducted in Brussels, Tunis and Rabat, in order to evaluate the EU’s evolving priorities in its southern neighbourhood. It is argued that despite a steady rhetorical commitment to ethical norm promotion in the region, the EU has consistently prioritised issues such as security and migration, with the exception of its immediate response to the uprisings in 2011. To explain this temporary and aberrant substantive shift, a hypothesis is presented drawing on Frank Schimmelfennig’s theory of rhetorical action, showing the consequences resulting from the intersection of the EU’s own rhetoric with the international attention garnered by the so-called “Arab Spring”. An analysis of policy responses to the Arab Uprisings not only sheds light on the nature, scope and limitations of ethics and norms in EU foreign policy, but also clarifies the nature of the EU as an international actor.
Thu, 19 Oct 2017 20:20:32 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/76152017-10-19T20:20:32ZThe Politics of Military Adaptation: The Development of a Theoretical Framework to Explain Military Adaptation's Importance to Politicshttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/7575
The Politics of Military Adaptation: The Development of a Theoretical Framework to Explain Military Adaptation's Importance to Politics
2017
Carlini, Del
This thesis investigates the phenomenon of in-conflict military adaptation and its dependence on political and bureaucratic oversight of military forces. Warfare is co-evolutionary. Armed forces deal with the pressures of a co-evolutionary fight by adapting. It follows that an armed force is likely to gain advantage by adapting and evolving faster than its co-evolving enemy. If armed forces in a conflict achieve objectives set by their political masters, the government in question achieves its geopolitical and/or domestic reasons for entering that conflict. If they fail or are hindered on the path to achievement of those objectives, the electability, reputation and legacy of political leaders is likely to be at risk. Therefore the rate of military adaptation becomes key to warfighter performance in warfare, and key to political success in committing to participation in war. To investigate the link between the fate of political leaders during conflict and the ability of warfighters to adapt within a co-evolutionary fight, this thesis explores a central question: What hinders the ability of an armed force to adapt during conflict, and what enhances the ability to adapt? The search involved the development of a theoretical framework, the Rate of In-Conflict Adaptation (ROICA) Theory, which is applied to a post-9/11 Iraq War case study involving American forces. The ROICA Theory contends that warfare moves in a Three Act Progression where progress through the Second Act of that progression heavily influences the outcomes of participation in a war. Within that Second Act, the rate at which an urgent adaptive request required as a response to a challenging battlespace traverses a hierarchical Chain-of-Decision-Making is measured as a Rate of In-Conflict Adaptation. It is an indicator of what hinders or enhances the ability to adapt during conflict. The ROICA theoretical framework is tested by process tracing the US defense system’s decision-making for the replacement of vulnerable Humvees with Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles in IED-rich Iraq. The major argument to emerge from this thesis is that politically successful outcomes in war are dependent on the ability of warfighters to adapt at the tactical level to the fight they are in, and within the tempo of that fight. Therefore tactical battlefield adaptation has strategic consequences. The ROICA Theory also demonstrates that various levels of decision-making impact the ability of the warfighter to adapt, and operate from different paradigms that are rarely aligned to warfighter needs. The resulting disconnect from those paradigm differences can impact the safety of warfighters and the electability, reputation and legacy of Presidents and Prime Ministers.
Sun, 08 Oct 2017 22:47:40 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/75752017-10-08T22:47:40ZThe Trials of Rivalry: Sino-Japanese Relations since the 1910shttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/7529
The Trials of Rivalry: Sino-Japanese Relations since the 1910s
2017
Withitwinyuchon, Nutthathirataa
This dissertation asks a challenging question: how can we explain the origination and, more importantly, the intensification of Sino-Japanese rivalry? It elucidates what led to rivalry between China and Japan in the first place and what causes the variance in the intensity of their rivalry by examining factors based on realism, constructivism, and the rivalry approach. It shows that the shift in dyadic power distribution, a much more long-term and relatively static factor, initiates rivalry in the case of Sino-Japanese relations. In addition, nationalism with a malignant aspect (offensive goal) and/or alliance dynamics with specific characteristics (targeting the rival outside the alliance) can influence the intensity of the rivalry. This dissertation examines the effects of the interplay between these causal factors in initiating and intensifying Sino-Japanese from the 1910s until 2016.
The hypothesis of rivalry origination is tested by investigating Japan’s continual rise in the 1910s, China’s ascendancy in the 1990s, and China’s persistent rise in the 2000s. I find that a shift in power distribution between China and Japan is closely associated with the development of their rivalry, as either rising China or Japan will expand its activities and interests outward, leading to conflicts of interest between them. Rivalries between them are found in the case of Shandong and Manchuria/Mongolia in the 1910s-30s, the East China Sea in the 1990s-2000s, and the East and South China Seas in the 2010s.
Regarding variance in rivalry intensity, the empirical findings demonstrate that nationalism with an offensive goal, such as those appearing in 1920s-30s Japan and in 2010s China, leads to a dangerous rivalry escalation when it emerges in the context of a dyadic power shift. Lastly, the investigations into the Sino-Soviet alliance in the 1920s-30s and the U.S.-Japan alliance from the end of the World War II until 2016 reveal that the alliances considerably contributed to increased hostility when they were directed against either of the rivalry dyad. In contrast, nationalism and alliances without the aforementioned characteristics, or those that did not occur in the context of a power shift, are not primary causes of rivalry intensification, but they can help to create an environment conducive to it. I reach the conclusion that the Sino-Japanese rivalry since the beginning of the 2010s may be escalating dangerously, given the role of offensive nationalism in China and the incipient development of such nationalism in Japan, coupled with the change in the nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance that continues to promote Japan’s growing military power in an attempt to contain China.
Fri, 01 Sep 2017 02:35:05 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/75292017-09-01T02:35:05ZGood Governance, Corruption and Growth: A Political Economy of Post-Socialist Industrial Transformation in Albania and Kosovo, 1998-2015http://hdl.handle.net/10523/7475
Good Governance, Corruption and Growth: A Political Economy of Post-Socialist Industrial Transformation in Albania and Kosovo, 1998-2015
2017
Uberti, Luca J.
Since the mid-1990s, the “rediscovery” of institutions in development theory and policy has brought political and bureaucratic corruption to the centre stage of donor interventions in developing countries. The Post-Washington Consensus (PWC) has augmented more traditional neo-liberal development perspectives by suggesting that good governance reforms are both necessary and sufficient to stimulate economic growth. In this dissertation, I examine the relation between good governance, corruption and growth and find both the “sufficiency” and “necessity” claim to be wanting. I test these propositions by examining the trajectory of industrial transformation of Albania and Kosovo, two low-middle income post-socialist economies located in the Western Balkans region. Both these countries rank amongst the world’s top recipients of development aid per capita, and provided an arena for the donor community to administer good governance interventions as if in a controlled experiment. By the lights of the PWC, they count as the “most likely” cases of development success. Nearly 20 years on, however, corruption remains endemic and the PWC’s promise of “accelerated development” has fallen flat. In fact, I suggest, external interventions might even have contributed to making corruption yet more anti-developmental.
Despite a generalised trend of industrial stagnation and impoverishment, some industrial sectors have succeeded in weathering the crisis of transition. This raises another puzzle: how can sectors flourish in an intensely “corrupt” business environment? To answer this question, I assemble and codify an emerging body of “sociological” research on corruption that studies in detail the social relations in which corrupt exchange is embedded. What is important from the point of view of economic growth, I claim, is not the incidence and magnitude of corruption, but its structure and organisation: “who bribes whom to get what”. Bribes are typically paid to obtain rents, some of which may promote learning and accumulation. Crucially, both bribes and rents are typically exchanged within the fabric of patron-client networks. Using a detailed sub-national analysis and novel survey data at the firm-level, I then examine the influence of patron-client networks on firm performance. While corruption explains little variation in the performance of Kosovar and Albanian industrial firms, (some) rents (including donor-led engineering consulting services) have a positive impact on total-factor productivity growth. Crucially, though, it is the structure of the patron-client relations comprising the firm’s (informal) institutional environment that explain the best part of sub-national variation in industrial performance. In particular, I find robust evidence in support of the proposition that patron-client networks in which power is more centralised are more developmental than forms of decentralised or fragmented clientelism. Detailed case-study evidence at the sector level corroborates these propositions. This work makes an important contribution to empirical institutional economics and contributes a novel analytical narrative of industrial development in two relatively less studied transition economies.
Mon, 17 Jul 2017 21:06:18 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/74752017-07-17T21:06:18ZThe balance of vulnerability and the distribution of fear in East Asiahttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/7454
The balance of vulnerability and the distribution of fear in East Asia
2017
Bailey, John
This dissertation examines East Asian reactions to the rise of China. More specifically, it seeks to address the question: ‘how can the distribution of fear in East Asia, which reflects a direct response to China’s rise, be explained?’ A realist theoretical explanation is advanced, highlighting the causal relationship between increasing asymmetric inter-state vulnerability and fear. Using a ‘crucial case’ approach, it is argued that in the face of the rising power of China, changes in economic dependence and the military balance are rendering nations more vulnerable, contributing to rising national fear (see Figure 2). If correct, this hypothesis represents a challenge to a range contemporary scholarship on East Asia, which holds that rising economic interdependence, identity construction and socialisation processes have substantially ameliorated fear in the region. At the same time, we seek to add greater sophistication to existing realist approaches on this general topic, which have focused on ‘capability’ as a monolithic variable. We attempt to do this by performing an in-depth analysis of the role of asymmetric vulnerability plays in East Asian state perceptions of China. This dissertation advances a material- based model of fear causation with national ‘vulnerability’ as an independent variable, and levels of regional fear (dependent variable). Through examination of the cases of Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, this study finds significant evidence that at least some regional states appear to be entering into reinforcing cycles of fear largely due to China’s military growth, as well as growing economic dependence, in contradiction with the expectations of liberal and constructivist scholars.
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 22:54:52 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/74542017-07-11T22:54:52ZThe Dollar-Wall Street Regime and New Zealand: The Political Implications of Financial Market Liberalisation for Macroeconomic Management in New Zealand, 1994 to 2011http://hdl.handle.net/10523/7284
The Dollar-Wall Street Regime and New Zealand: The Political Implications of Financial Market Liberalisation for Macroeconomic Management in New Zealand, 1994 to 2011
2017
Richards, Byron Anthony James
This is a study of New Zealand’s retention and entrenchment of a neoliberal policy regime, focusing on the role played by international finance. The study examines the influence that international private financial markets and institutions exerted over the macroeconomic policy formulation of New Zealand governments during the period from 1994 to 2011. It is argued that the emergence of international private financial markets and New Zealand’s subsequent integration into these markets was instrumental in successive governments retaining and entrenching all of the core features of a neoliberal macroeconomic policy nexus. This includes, most prominently: a monetary policy regime focused on maintaining low, stable inflation; an independently floating foreign exchange regime; and a conservative fiscal policy oriented towards surplus-generation and public debt reduction.
The study utilises a sophisticated neopluralist theoretical framework that also draws on neo-Marxist analyses developed in the field of international political economy. Within this theoretical framework, neopluralism identifies the key sources of business power within contemporary liberal democracies. Respectively, neo-Marxist international political economy identifies the major sources of the power of private financial capital within an increasingly inter-connected global economic system. This theoretical approach provides a coherent and empirically-grounded explanation of the crucial role played by international private financial markets in successive New Zealand governments’ retention and entrenchment of all of the key features of the neoliberal macroeconomic policy nexus.
A critical realist methodology is used to apply the theoretical framework deployed in this thesis. This entails the use of primarily, but not exclusively, qualitative data -such as historical company reports, official government policy statements, official statistics, and interviews with key actors involved in the process -to develop a robust analysis of the influence that international private financial markets exercised over macroeconomic policy formulation in New Zealand during the period from 1994 to 2011. This analysis highlights the causal significance of the political activities of individual human agents, while also identifying the broader underlying causal mechanisms that were at play.
The central finding of this study is that the comprehensive programme of financial market liberalisation and financial sector deregulation implemented by the Fourth Labour Government between 1984 and 1990 effectively served to integrate New Zealand into the Dollar-Wall Street Regime. Comprising the current system governing contemporary international financial relations, the Dollar-Wall Street Regime accords a central role in public macroeconomic management to international private financial markets. The major political effects of New Zealand’s integration into the Dollar-Wall Street Regime during the period from 1994 to 2011 derived from a transformation of the underlying structural relationship between the state and internationally-mobile financial capital. This resulted in a curtailment of the operational autonomy of the state, the ability of citizen voters to exert democratic political influence, and, ultimately, the retention of a neoliberal macroeconomic policy agenda.
Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:36:06 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/10523/72842017-04-09T21:36:06Z